James Fulford at the Vdare blog links VFR’s discussions, and then comes up with the best summation of the meaning of Gatesgate that I’ve seen:

The obvious point is that if anyone was being a racist here, it’s Gates. He sees a policeman come to his door, judges him by the color of his skin and his blue uniform, and starts yelling….

That’s it. Gates sees a police officer simply doing his job, and because the officer is white, Gates immediately commences calling him a racist and accusing him of coming to Gates’s door for no other reason than to hassle a black man. Gates’s conduct reveals in its raw essence the elite liberal and nonwhite stance toward ordinary, white America: it is bigotry and hatred, aimed at intimidating, delegitimizing, devaluing, and discombobulating white people, because they’re white. It is the Big Lie, doing to whites what it falsely accuses whites of doing to nonwhites. This liberal aggression against white America will continue, unopposed, until whites start to oppose it.

The fact that there is a large component of the usual victimological black hustle in Gates’s behavior does not cancel the intimidating effect that his behavior has, and is intended to have, on whites.

Also, it seems to me that there’s another implied message in Gates’s actions. It is that a white police officer has no business asking any questions of a black. It is as though Gates were declaring that the writ of (white) America does not extend over black people, in the same way that the laws of Britain and France no longer extend into all-Muslim towns and banlieus, and white people no longer dare venture there, because sharia rules there, not the laws of the country. Gates seems to be at least implicitly invoking a kind of black “sharia” that bars the laws and norms of the United States from having sway over black areas and black homes.

Here’s the main part of the Fulford entry:

The obvious point is that if anyone was being a racist here, it’s Gates. He sees a policeman come to his door, judges him by the color of his skin and his blue uniform, and starts yelling. The latest story, published in the New York Times, is that Gates is demanding a humiliating apology from James Crowley, the arresting officer, (“I would like a one-on-one with Officer Crowley,” he said in an interview, “and I’d like him to apologize. But that will in no way determine if I sue him, the Police Department or the city”) and it includes this startling fact:

“[Gates’s] front door was stuck shut, and his taxi driver helped him pry it open. According to the subsequent police report, a woman called to report two black men trying to force entry.”

Because there were two black men trying to force entry–Gates was breaking into his own house. This is not a crime, of course. I’ve done it myself. So have most of my readers, unless they live in a town so small and monocultural that they don’t lock their doors. But it certainly justifies a police officer asking a question or two.

And if Gates weren’t a racist himself, he wouldn’t object to a white policeman inquiring when someone was reported breaking into his home.